general questions about updates

[Craig Routledge]

On 2007-08-29 09:23, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 08:43:37AM -0400, Chris Aitken wrote:
> > I just got my first "There are four updates" offering. Then I get to 
> > view the updates to accept them or not. Is there any general wisdom 
> > about accepting these updates?
> > 
> > 1. Are they usually so small you might as well just take 'em all?

On broadband yes.  On dialup, some of the big packages you'd better let 
download while you do something else.

They are sometimes upgrades to new versions.  Usually they are bugfixes and 
security updates.  So in general you always want to update, regardless of 
size.

My brother is not technically inclined, so I set up his machine to 
automatically download and apply all updates.  In three years, there has 
only been one problem.  The video driver for his machine in the mainline 
kernel stopped working once.

You wouldn't want to do that for a production system, but it's fine for a 
home system.  You can always revert the update until it gets sorted out.

> On Debian I pretty much always upgrade everything unless I have a
> specific reason for not upgrading something, in which case I put it on
> hold.

Agreed.  Those exclusions should be quite rare.  I currently don't have 
any.

> > 2. Are they likely to enhance operations of other applications - ones 
> > that don't seem to be related to the update package? For instance is 
> > elfutils likely to help me with anything other than an app called "elf" 
> > (if there is such a beast)?

Many are libraries or utilities that may be used by other applications.  So 
yes.

> > 3. Are the offerings customized to my system, or are they just all the 
> > updates created in the four days since I installed fedora7 (four seems 
> > like a lot, btw - I'm amazed how people work on these things for 
> nothing
> 
> > but the pleasure of doing a good thing)?
> 
> Just the updates in the last four days to the packages you have
> installed (at least I hope that is how fedora's update system works).

Correct.

> > Here are the offerings:
> > 
> > updated liberation-fonts packages available

> Some font package I guess.  Never heard of it.  Not in Debian under any
> name similar to that.

If I recall correctly, they are fonts designed to be drop in replacements 
for Microsoft Windows fonts that appear on many webpages, but are 
distributed under an open license.



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